Great Island Arts Co-op

The 2018 Great Island Artists-In-Residence

The Great Island Arts Co-operative is thrilled to announce our 2018 Artists-in-Residence:

Celia Marquis is an illustrator and cartoonist from Montreal. Her practice is split between autobiography and diaristic narration through collection of experiences, and the works of fiction fuelled by those observations.

Jamie Q is a genderqueer artist who makes paintings, sculptures, drawings, zines, prints, and textile art. Their most recent work includes fabric design, quilts, and garments. Their projects engage ideas around arts economies and value, gender and queerness, craft and repurposed materials, and process-based play.

Sayo Umeda is a puppet artist based in Montreal. She likes the Canadian style of puppetry, so she came back to Canada from Japan. She is exploring a new possibility of puppet theatre as a medium to express inner feelings and would like to establish a new art form incorporating music with puppetry to create an all-new type of musical group.

Sika Valmé is an illustrator and singer songwriter from Haïti based in Montreal. Best known for her interdisciplinary approach, her creations articulate the vibrancy of home through an introspective and imaginative universe which borrows from a subjective and intertwined emotional source. Illustrating abstract and organic textures, her work gives a voice to what is kept silent.

We received many strong submissions, and we are grateful to all the artists who applied for sharing their work with us. We also want to extend our deepest thanks to the volunteers who worked with Great Island Arts board member and treasurer, Faith Wiley, to carry out the selection process: Amélie Brindamour, Janessa Brunet, Meg Gagliardi, and Elise Boudreau Graham.

Last but not least: for the first time, thanks to many individual donors, we are offering our 2018 Artists-in-Residence a $250 honorarium in addition to studio space and accommodations on Great Island. This has been a priority for us since we founded the Great Island Arts Co-operative in 2016, and we are humbled by the generosity of those who have contributed to help us achieve this goal. If you’d like to chip in to support future residencies, you can donate any amount, small or large. Everything helps. Thanks for thinking of us!